Pat Dollard might agree, and say “Fuck yeah.” The former Hollywood agent is now lionized by Fox and Republican revanchists for his midlife makeover to “War on Terror” propagandist. His time self-embedded in Iraq has become Young Americans, the trailer of which plays like Jackass goes to War, and includes footage of a Marine raising a severed Iraqi head to the camera to a thrashing soundtrack of “If you don’t like it you can suck my dick!”

And so, RigInt gets to the nitty gritty of Pat Dollard, with this – following a somewhat gut churning slice of his other film, The Three Days:

And as awful as it is, Dollard is right. As right as Pasolini was when he had one of Salo‘s torturers say “We Fascists are the only true anarchists. Once we’ve become masters of the state, true anarchy is that of power.” Transgressive brutality is a path of transformation, at least to a sociopath, and fascism is an ideology of sociopaths. Dollard is embraced by America’s fascist elite because behind their paper house of flittering justifications for catastrophe, he’s the exultant “Fuck Yeah!” the architects of mayhem still don’t dare exclaim in public.

George Bush is not the architect of his wars, but rather another cowboy advocate, and like Dollard he can still delight in them even as he fulfills his job on the team by lying them into being. A couple of weeks ago Washington Life Magazine‘s Soroush Shehabi, a grandson of a Pahlavi-era minister of Iran, used a presidential reception to warn, Bush, as though he didn’t already know, that “one US bomb on Iran and the regime will remain in power for another 20 or 30 years and 70 million Iranians will become radicalized.” Bush answered, “I know,” to which Soroush responded, “But does Vice President Cheney know?” Bush walked away, chuckling.

I admit I did not know of Pat Dollard, or if I ever did had dropped him from the brain… I surely did know of Saló and Pasolini, seeing the film when it came out… Amazing, amazing film. In fact, recently seeing Kissinger escorted from the services for Ford by a young Navy man in his dress uniform, I flashed on the film. Let’s just say it was a highly erotic escort down the carved stone steps…

With Salo, Pasolini updates de Sade from early 18th Century France to Fascist Italy. (Indeed Salo is an Italian province where Pasolini spent parts of his childhood and had witnessed first hand the mindless thuggery of Mussolini’s fascists). In Pasolini’s view, de Sade’s work, which was essentially a work of pornography, takes on an added political meaning to talk about the corruption of absolute power. Outside of this though, Pasolini remains remarkably faithful to the text of the de Sade work, replicating the depravities and the structure of the nightly tales by the gathered guests. Salo is certainly Pasolini’s most controversial work and still remains banned over two decades in many countries of the world.

From Ezekiel’s link at Not an American, Why Liberals Have No Answer for Pat Dollard:

Yes, there was a stupid macho side of the new left that would later give birth to the feminist and gay liberation movements, but the popular culture influence by the movement against the war in Vietnam also valued the feminine, the childlike, the lyrical undercurrents of American history that the current opposition to the war in Iraq most emphatically rejects.

From the constant drumbeat on Democratic Party affiliated websites like Atrios, Jesus’ General, and Operation Yellow Elephant to get Bush’s daughters into the military, to the bills in front of Congress by liberal Democrats like Charles Rangel calling for a reintroduction of the draft, to grassroots leftist support for old Vietnam era reactionaries like Jim Webb, to the recommendations that anti-war protesters wear suits and ties, the opposition to the war in Iraq is politically liberal, but culturally conservative. It values the hard, the masculine. It looks back to the rugged blue-collar authenticity of the old urban Democratic Party machines, not to the visionary and the lyrical politics of the new left..

Just count the number of diaries on the left Democratic web community Daily Kos that express the sentiment that “my Democratic Party daddy can beat up your Republican Party Daddy”. Obama “smacks down” Dick Cheney. Al Gore “schools” George Bush. Howard Dean “bitch slaps” Joe George Allen. The air is thick with testosterone poisoning.

Ain’t it the truth… with Long War the utterly futile debasement can only get worse.

The so called liberal left, Democratic progressives, whatever name they cling to… no, they have no answer for Pat Dollard and the utter wildness, the high pitched, manic fever of the hardened extreme Right… they are still struggling with the simple, direct and powerful play that Donohue ran… still struggling, albeit manfully, with “to apologise or not”.

As if it mattered.

In structuring Saló, Pasolini utilizes the circles of hell as elaborated in Dante’s Inferno. The film thus far has been entitled “ANTINFERNO,” or the antechamber of hell. As they enter the villa, the “circle of obsessions” or manias begins. This circle is dominated by the detailed recounting of perverse sexual encounters, interspersed with violent episodes of sexual deviation and domination committed by the libertines upon the young boys and girls. Next is the “circle of shit,” dominated by images of coprophagy. The film culminates in the “circle of blood,” dominated by images of torture and death.

Each of the circles is introduced by an elegant madame who has spent her life servicing the most base desires of libertinage. Each woman spins lewd yarns relating to her circle, which are designed to excite the libertines and provoke similar action. The idea of reproducing the acts told in the stories is key; Pasolini’s film is a tale of frustrated desire, of impotence taking its vengeance on a helpless underclass. The libertines’ sexual voracity requires the constant exploration of the most grotesque and imaginative eroticism; the telling of stories adds fuel to their fire.

Throughout the stories, a fourth woman is always present playing the piano. She begins by playing tunes from “Showboat,” progresses through Romantic composers like Chopin, and by the end plays atonal and unsettling experimental music in the vein of Scriabin or Hindemith. This musical progression is structured to complement the visual semiotics of a nightmarish descent. The constant presence of music underneath the stories is vital, and lends the libertines and their affairs a decidedly bourgeois character.

”…replicating the depravities and the structure of the nightly tales by the gathered guests.”

[C]ontrary to the impression of most observers, the great majority of the checkpoints are not even near the Green Line, Israels internationally recognised border until it occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. Some are so deep inside Palestinian territory that the army refuses to allow Machsom Watch to visit them. There, the women say, no one knows what abuses are being perpetrated unseen on Palestinians.

But at Huwara checkpoint, where the old man refused to submit, the soldiers know that most of the time they are being watched by fellow Israelis and that their behaviour is being recorded in monthly logs. Machsom Watch has a history of publishing embarrassing photographs and videos of the soldiers’ actions. It showed, for example, a videotape in 2004 of a young Palestinian man being forced to play his violin at Beit Iba checkpoint, a story that gained worldwide attention because it echoed the indignities suffered by Jews at the hands of the Nazis.

Machsom Watch has about 500 members, reportedly including Olmert’s leftwing daughter, Dana. But only about 200 actively take part in checkpoint duties, an experience that has left many outspoken in denouncing the occupation. The organisation is widely seen by the Israeli public as extremist, with pro-Israel groups accusing the women of “demonising” Israel. [snip]

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Dollard is profiled in the March Vanity Fair – the longest profile in the magazine’s history – and when asked about the footage he laughs: “The true savagery in this war is being committed by the American left on the minds of the young men and women serving over there by repeatedly telling them that their cause is lost. My goal is to de-sensitize young people to violence.” He
calls liberals “nihilistic.”

My goal is to de-sensitize young people to violence

Just like in a melodrama, the villian always tells you their dastardly plan…unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a hero astride a white horse charging in to untie us from the tracks and save us from the on-rushing train. (yeah, yeah I know: hero worship and villian vilification is what got us in this mess-o-potamia to begin with)

Tony Snow describes Dollard as a “true believer,” while a 17-year old high school student writes that “the clips I’ve seen of Young Americans are an inspiration and its time someone tells the truth. Thanks for putting your life on the line for the better of the country.”

thanks for the link. I will take a peek. I did try to weave in a Box Car Site link that was sent to me… but! It just did not make the cut… 😉 what can I say… falling standards out on the party hustings!

So whereas Lieberman is claiming now that everything is different today because we had no real strategy before for ensuring security, it was Lieberman himself who promised Americans in 2005 that we did have exactly such a strategy and that it was working so well that “we can have a much smaller American military presence there by the end of 2006 or in 2007.”

Just compare these two statements:

Joe Lieberman, today: “previously there weren’t enough soldiers to hold key neighborhoods after they had been cleared of extremists and militias.”

Joe Lieberman, 2005: “The administration’s recent use of the banner ‘clear, hold, and build’ accurately describes the strategy as I saw it being implemented last week.”

How can Joe Lieberman claim today that we previously lacked sufficient troop strength to hold neighborhoods after they were cleared, when he insisted a year ago that we were holding neighborhoods — he saw it himself — and that we were therefore on the verge of success?

I have never heard of this Dollard character, and frankly, I don’t know if I can stand to hear or read anything about him. From the snips I’ve read here, it sounds as if he would have been very happy and done very well with Joseph Goebbels as his boss.

That’s the problem when you lie for convenience, like Lieberman, Rumsfeld et al. It’s hard to remember the lies. But you’d think they’d at least try. It does show a complete disdain for the American people though. They think we don’t pay attention.

When Ray McGovern confronted Rumsfeld with his own words (which he had just denied he ever said) all he could do was splutter. The problem is the media doesn’t confront them on a daily basis, so they have no need to at least become better liars.

As for Pat Dollard, I don’t know, his schtick sounds like all the rest of those chickenhawk rightwingers’ schtick. They talk tough. They cheerlead for brutality, but stay far away from it themselves. Dollard is a propagandist and if the war criminals are ever prosecuted, so should the various propagandists, like ‘Dullard’

Rude and crude, part of the spreading dailykos disease, the dominance of the lower-middlebrow.

Yes, ‘lower-middlebrow’. The FPers are merely ‘stenographers’, boring and usually behind with any breaking news. Kos wants machines to just produce links and copy and paste. There’s only one who actually writes his own thoughts. They are selling books, Yrly Kos and posting stats. You don’t need writers for that, as kos himself said. You just need secretaries. Nice scheme, he gets a free secretarial pool. He understands ego and what people are willing to do for it.

Their ‘dominance’ is pretty limited to their own blog. Their ‘brand’ is just not appealing to a large audience. It’s also getting less and less interesting to observe. All those who did make it interesting seem to have been driven off, or left on their own.

A Libby jurist has been removed from the jury because of having seen news reports of the trial. For a few hours this morning there was a fear there might be a mistrial. I’m sure this was what Libby’s team was hoping for.

Take Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware. Asked on one of the Sunday venues for pompous pontificators how he would respond to any attempt by President Bush to escalate the war in Iraq (to “surge,” if you prefer it in Newspeak), the Democratic “leader” on foreign policy responded, “There’s not much I can do about it.”

This is a man who sees a future president during his morning look in the mirror. Sadly, the glass reflects an empty suit who embodies the congressional Democrats’ decision to reduce action on Iraq to a political calculus appropriate for the highway appropriations bill, not a moral imperative to challenge a policy that has sent thousands of twenty-somethings to their deaths in the desert.

You certainly can do something about it, Senator. It’s called leadership. You rise on the Senate floor. You say you were out of your mind to write a blank check for this hideous abuse of American military power. And then you propose immediate withdrawal, just slow enough to maximize the safety of the 135,000 young men and women you helped put in harm’s way by your collusion with this elective war. You do what Republican Sen. Gordon Smith of Oregon had the guts to do last month, stopping just short of accurately labeling this public policy obscenity a criminal enterprise.

[…]

But like millions of other Americans, I can no longer contain the primal scream I want to direct at the members of my party who declined to engage in a real debate in the run-up to this completely avoidable misjudgment of old men and women. Nonexistent, and certainly nonthreatening, WMDs. A secularist paper-tiger dictator, despised by the Islamist lunatics behind the September 11 attacks. A tribal culture with zero indigenous movement for pluralistic democracy.

All of those things were knowable when congressional Democrats such as Biden had an opportunity to stop this madness before it started. Some of them actually shared the neoconservative pretensions of a new American imperialism. But most just quaked in their permanent campaign boots, fearing being labeled Cold War-style liberal wimps. They averted their eyes and closed their mouths instead of acting like a responsible opposition party.

Now, trying to finesse their way out of their Faustian bargain, Democrats engage in a transparent anti-war vamp, with limp proposals to implement the 9/11 commission report and half-measures opposing escalation. And they receive aid and comfort from misguided and timid editorial pages, like those of The Washington Post and The New York Times, which also colluded with power in the run-up to the Iraq war instead of challenging it and which now circumscribe discourse with the narrow frame of how best to muddle through rather than promote an honest debate about whether to stay or go.

If this former DNC shill over at Reason magazine has just now awakened to the spinelessness of his do-nothing party, he might as well have stayed asleep. That was more like a long thin whine than a primal scream.

Rumsfeld loved these [Bush I era doomsday nuclear war COG (continuence of government) role-playing] games. There were others who were frequent players in the exercises, notably Dick Cheney. “Cheney and the others often had other priorities,” recalls the former Pentagon official. “Rumsfeld always came.” He wasn’t just trying to organize a devastated country. He was fighting World War III, or at least simulating what nuclear theory suggested such a conflict would be like.

Herein lies an aspect of Rumsfeld’s career — and character — that remained deeply buried even after word of his participation in the COG exercises leaked out. Faced with the most awesome choices a simulated environment could present, placed in a situation that was designed and advertised as a rehearsal for what might one day be terrifyingly real, Rumsfeld had one primary response. He always tried to unleash the maximum amount of nuclear firepower possible.

The teams taking part in the game were presented with two main tasks: reconstitution of some sort of working government, and retaliation against whomever had inflicted the disaster. The first of these, reconstruction, was generally considered the most urgent. But this part, according to fellow players, did not interest Rumsfeld. “He always wanted to move on to retaliation as quickly as possible,” recalls a former senior official in the office of the secretary of defense, “he was one who always went for the extreme option.”

A former participant, enlisted to take the role of a senior national security official, described how his “war” began with a limited Soviet attack in Europe. “It seemed quite possible to defuse the crisis,” he recalled, stressing that the State Department “team,” was working to avoid an all-out thermonuclear exchange. Rumsfeld, however, had a different agenda. From the outset, this participant remembers, the once and future defense secretary was determined to “launch everything we had left” at the entire communist bloc, Russians and Chinese together.

Over at Who Is IOZ, I found a very nice antidote to the line of “thought” being expressed at that dKos diary linked to above:

What is the source of this bottomless confidence in the essential goodness of “Americans” or “many Americans,” or “the American people”; on what basis do we arrive at this claim that but for the lies told to them by their less-than-noble, less-than-honest patriarchs, these American people would rise up in recognition of their current transgressions and past sins, retreat, and resolve not to repeat the shameful crimes of empire, forever and ever, on earth as it is in heaven, hallelujah, amen?

Because it is not at all obvious to me that Americans, such as they are, give one good goddamn or one high-flying fuck about a “strategy designed to preserve security in Iraq.” “Security in Iraq” is not their concern. “Security in America” is their concern–that’s why they acquiesce with nary a whimper to every security-vs.-liberty argument put forward by their governors . . . and that is why they support wars to kill the wogs who killed the World Trade Center.

[snip]

If tomorrow or the next day, George W. Bush decides to begin a campaign against Iran, and it seems icreasingly near and certainly inevitable, then the cable news networks will go back to Crisis:Iran subtitles, the generals will come back on to babble about strategy, the yellow-ribbon magnets will reassert themselves, the nominal opposition will fall back in line, the “failure” in Iraq will fade from the front of our collective consciousness[.]

[snip]

I have been asked a number of times why it is that I don’t use what meager skills I have to propose a positive program to rectify our national shames and shortcomings. Why don’t I offer some way “to change it?” Why don’t I “do something?” Why aren’t I “productive?” I’ve given plenty of answers, some truer than others. But here is a more honest answer, the most honest I can give: I’m not especially convinced that Americans, many Americans, the American people, or America deserve anything other than what they’re about to get.

I’ve often thought that myself during the last 27 years. It was during the Reagan administration that I first started feeling this way. Of course there was plenty of reason to believe that earlier, but youthful idealism will blind you to a lot that ought to be perfectly obvious.

This was originally part of my previous comment, but I decided it was getting to long, and I should post this in another one.

Andrew (brother of Alexander and Patrick) Cockburn has a new book regarding Donald Rumsfeld. There was a short piece from it in the Opnion section of yesterday’s WaPo, and today Salon.com has another, really fascinating one:

A few months after the inauguration [of George H.W. Bush in 1989], Donald Rumsfeld was invited to play the role of president of the United States in an exercise devised by a Washington think tank.. . . “It was an exercise devised by the Center for Strategic and International Studies [CSIS] to study the functioning of the War Powers Act,” remembers Markey, a liberal Democratic congressman from Massachusetts. “We acted out roles.”. . . But this Washington exercise was a comparatively lighthearted affair compared to Rumsfeld’s role in games that were far more elaborate, and deeply secret. Well away from journalists and others lacking highly restricted security clearances, he could perform not merely as a chief executive, but one faced with the awesome responsibility of waging nuclear war.

The games were designed to test a program known as COG, Continuity of Government, and they concerned the ability of the government to continue to function during and after a nuclear attack. Everything about these exercises was secret.. . . Plans to enable the government to survive a nuclear attack dated back to the early days of the cold war, when vast bunkers were excavated in the countryside around Washington in which the various organs of government could take shelter.. . A major development occurred in the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was sold not only on the notion of a missile defense shield, but also on the practicality of fighting a prolonged strategic nuclear war, lasting up to six months. This decision lent added emphasis to the need for keeping the machinery of government going amid the radioactive ruins.

In consequence, the money allocated for COG began to soar to previously undreamed-of heights. A prime architect of the revised system has disclosed to me that the budget hit $1 billion a year by the end of Reagan’s first term. Lending intellectual weight to this costly initiative was Andrew Marshall, an influential defense intellectual who had first crossed paths with Rumsfeld when he was secretary of defense. Early in the Reagan years, Marshall predicted that a “weakening” Soviet Union might lash out in a surprise nuclear attack, thus necessitating the extensive facilities in which Rumsfeld was invited to exercise his post-apocalypse leadership skills.

Marshall and others had long maintained that the Soviet strategy involved “decapitation” of the US leadership and that therefore some of the first warheads would land on Washington, very possibly obliterating the president and other senior officials. COG planners therefore began training teams of individuals experienced in national security matters who would be ready to take over and resurrect some sort of government.. . . This highly secret program was known as Project 908, and among the individuals earmarked to take power when disaster struck was Donald Rumsfeld. Every so often he would disappear from his Chicago office, leaving no word of where he was headed, or why. Once off the map, he would be moved on a military transport to one of the secret headquarters created as part of the COG network. There, for several days, he would be immured in artificial caverns, staring at electronic displays streaming data of disaster and confusion, sleeping on cots and subsisting on the most austere rations. As often as not, players who had been brought to the locations on planes with blacked-out windows had no idea where they were. A participant in one exercise recalled that “we knew we were in the South, because the people serving the food had Southern accents, but that was all.”

Rumsfeld loved these games.. . . He wasn’t just trying to organize a devastated country. He was fighting World War III[.]. . . Herein lies an aspect of Rumsfeld’s career — and character — that remained deeply buried even after word of his participation in the COG exercises leaked out. Faced with the most awesome choices a simulated environment could present, placed in a situation that was designed and advertised as a rehearsal for what might one day be terrifyingly real, Rumsfeld had one primary response. He always tried to unleash the maximum amount of nuclear firepower possible.

The teams taking part in the game were presented with two main tasks: reconstitution of some sort of working government, and retaliation against whomever had inflicted the disaster. The first of these, reconstruction, was generally considered the most urgent. But this part, according to fellow players, did not interest Rumsfeld. “He always wanted to move on to retaliation as quickly as possible,” recalls a former senior official in the office of the secretary of defense, “he was one who always went for the extreme option.”

Cockburn goes on to relate that these exercises went on for years, well past the point where the Soviet Union ceased to exist. At this point, during the Clinton years, terrorists were substituted for the Evil Empire, but significantly the terrorists were always working as agents of of an existing state. A bin Laden type organization, tolerated by a rouge regime but acting entirely independent of it, was never considered. There was another significant change in how these games were played also:

In earlier times the specialists selected to run the “shadow government” had been drawn from across the political spectrum, Democrats and Republicans alike. But now, down in the bunkers, Rumsfeld found himself in politically congenial company, the players’ roster being filled almost exclusively with Republican hawks.

“It was one way for these people to stay in touch. They’d meet, do the exercise but also sit around and castigate the Clinton administration in the most extreme way,” a former Pentagon official with direct knowledge of the phenomenon told me. “You could say this was a secret government-in-waiting. The Clinton administration was extraordinarily inattentive, [they had] no idea what was going on.”

I am reminded of the book and film Seven Days In May. After reading it Gore Vidal asked one of the co-authors Fletcher Knebel what had given him the idea to write it. “Talking to Admiral Radford. He scared the hell out of me. I could imagine the Joint Chiefs getting together and kicking Kennedy out.” The quote is from memory, I’m sure it’s accurate.

The only good thing we know about these lunatics is that they are old men and can’t live forever, well at least we think they can’t. But they all have another decade of destruction left in their bones, so how are they dealing with the inconvenience that an election in a year and a half will cause their grasp on control and dominance?

For eons, I’ve believed these men aren’t going to give up power peaceably, but how will they keep it?

Oh marisacat, I love your “top clicks” section. I went back to Bob’s Johnson fable of socialist bakeries and somebody added yet another tag “anti-union propaganda.” Also looks like top kos-kissers cookiescare and nightstalker were alerted to Johnson’s flail and checked in. LOL.

hmm I was trying, way back, to craft something from Francis Bacon’s paintings (which I love – saw the ’75 exhibition at the Met and the ’91 retrospective in LA at LACMA and a couple big shows in between) and Abu Ghraib imagery… but it was just at the time I left LSF… I lost track of my thoughts.

This came together quite easily, prompted as it was by Rigorous Intuition… .

I’d love to see what you would write on it, arcturus… let me know if you do.

The only good thing we know about these lunatics is that they are old men and can’t live forever, well at least we think they can’t.

Don’t bet on it. And besides, they’re just a symptom. I mean Rummy, a man who, at table top exercises, “always tried to unleash the maximum amount of nuclear firepower possible” and “always wanted to move on to retaliation as quickly as possible” and “always went for the extreme option” rose to the top of his profession. eeek. How scary is that?

Don’t my fellow Evil Followers think that someone somewhere along the line might have noticed that there was something wrong with him?

well doesn’t a lot of it rise frm the executive orders, related to National Security, of Reagan? I don’t have a link handy on that (will see what I can google up)… but it was really only Clinton that whipped FEMA into an actual national disaster recovery group (just in time for the hundred/500 year floods in the Mid West, iirc)… seems i have read it was just a patronage plum hang out previous. And now again of course.

provoking. When I finished reading it I was debating your thoughts in my head, but by the time I got to the comments I realized you must have hit some sore spots because of the tone of the comments. Sorry, I was going to participate but I’ve been scared off.

Frankly, the commenters who were whining about how they couldn’t understand what that diarist was writing about showed more about their lack of reading comprehension than anything. That definitely was a thought-provoking diary and the contents deserved a decent dialogue – not the knee-jerk fuck you response that it got.

Ironically, the defensiveness shown by some of the commenters highlighted exactly what the diarist was talking about: that sort of masculine-type aggressiveness that is used to stifle dissent. It was like a “yo mamma” pile on.

since it’s probably one of those things I’ll never get around to (& ties in well to what Pasolini’s doing), here, a taste of Thomas Moore’s Dark Eros: The Imagination of Sadism (Spring Publications, 1990):

The value of Sade’s literary creations is that they give a mythic background to the violence of the heart. In this way Sade is a doctor of the soul, treating our loneliness, our violence, and our various forms of dehumanization with homeopathic images, with scenarios of mythic proportions that unveil the darkly ominous themes hiding behing cheery rationalizations. – pp. 86-7

In some ways, the “scandal” of Saló goes beyond politics, beyond ideology, beyond even sexual horror… spectators of Saló are drawn inexorably into a web of complicity with the monstrous libertines- a terrible web where they are compelled to see both Pasolini, and themselves, as one of their number. As the spectators are thus compelled to identify with the libertines, Pasolini is doubly effective in the expostulation of his theorem. Beyond the personal horror of an individual experience, spectators are directly challenged in their beliefs, their lifestyles, their sexualities.

Pier Paolo Pasolini was the kind of common sense looney I could’ve enjoyed a beer with! A nice cold Peroni =)

Seriously, though. What do you expect from the folks at dKos? It’s SYFPH all day, every day. It’ll take a major blow right between the eyes to wake them up. Maybe it’s true for the majority of the sleeping US citizens too. Sad…

My cut line in Dem elections is “will they vote in the next war”… and with very very few exceptions anyone who got cyber scribble ink and splooge WAS GOING TO BE A FUCKING WAR MONGER. Sestak, Webb? etc? Think they will GIVE UP WAR!? Not bloody likely. or Patrick Murphy, little blahgers are so surprised he is a Blue Dog. Doubt he will give up war, long term.

Anyone Rahm pushed (and imo the Boyz spoke or shut up all too often on a wink or nod from DC3 or DSCC) will be a vote for war. And so on.

Unless of course people are pleased to hear a middle manager (“mismanaged”) take on god damned war.

The sad thing is that Biden could conceivably be the only one standing when all the shouting is over, and that I’d fully expect the average Democrat partisan to meekly vote for the miserable fucker. He is the epitome of everything that’s wrong with the party and the people who enable its continued existence, boiled and distilled into a single human form.

My theory is that he just plans to lie low until the rest have shot each other down, Mcat. He is such a tempting target that they’ll leave him for last while they deal with one another.

As for all these DNC screechers that, as Smithee said, are only now conceding that we’ve all been had, well– they could start the hard work of grooming and running an outsider candidate tomorrow– if they wanted to. They could begin the hard work of convincing their erstwhile leaders that it’s not just grovelling and wailing and pleading anymore– they are serious about taking their toys and walking;Consequences be damned.

Well no, they are too busy talking of challenging Tauscher. Even tho as Wapo reported, Trial Lawyers quietly dropped out of “Working for us” and Stern assured her “not to worry”…

LOL.

Rather like they neglected ot mention that Lieberman had a 65% approval rating when they decided that a weak candidate and a papier mache kiss on a truck bed could take him down. SInce they are so bitchy about marchers and demonstrators. Tit v Tat.

I never got the Lamont thing. There was never any point in a primary challenge from a millionaire. There was already a rich millionaire Democrat in the race– Lieberman. Why in blazes would anyone with a brain be motivated to vote for Lamont then ?

If they’re serious, they’ll have to start by flipping off the DP and running a candidate 3rd Party or Indy. All primaries do is assure that money and connections stay in the veal pen. There’s just no fucking point to it at all. They’ll also have to find a candidate who is actually something other than the same old pre-digested tapioca.

Non-voters need to be brought out. They will not come out for the same old garbage from the same old hacks who promise little and deliver even less.

Anyone Rahm pushed (and imo the Boyz spoke or shut up all too often on a wink or nod from DC3 or DSCC) will be a vote for war. And so on.

Well, I think the whole “Fighting Dems”… kinda made it clear that they were pushing to militarize the Democratic Party. I get a kick out how many “Admirals” and “Majors” (who are all of 20 years old) are running around Daily Kos saluting each other and calling Kos and FPers “Sir”….

Well, Mcat, bless the ones who are at least forthright about that being their main goal. The sort of weepy, passive-aggressive shit I see in spaces like Gilliard about how they’re really Doing It All For The Less Fortunate just makes me want to hurl what’s left of breakfast. I’ll take baldfaced opportunism over fake martyrdom any damn day of the week. 😀

well yeah they all want some senator or senior rep to re-arrange the collective diaper. Pretty evident. The meuling is just the sell job. It sure worked for a long time and is STILL working. But again, no different than the party games.

Well, S.B., that’s more like cut-rate starfucking on the Kozzies’ part than it is genuine opportunism. I mean, they ask for nothing more, really. No big surprise that “nothing more” is what they get.

Google video had a feature recently of several anti-war demonstrators who got escorted/dragged from a meeting with WA Sen. Patty Murray. They repeatedly interrupted her speech on local law enforcement to demand that she either vote against continued funding of the war, or turn herself in to the police for participating in war crimes.

I’m sure the Kozzies would positively swoon in horror if anyone suggested anything so terribly tacky to them. Well, I’m sure they could be persuaded to call Murray a few gender-specific names on camera. The rest, not so sure… :p

another source of creeping fascist imagery is 24, which jane meyer did a good job on in the new yorker last week.

what struck me was how pissed the army and FBI interrogators were about the sadistic crap that fills that show. and how concerned they were about that show’s impact and influence on the new soldiers that they were training.

Lol, what to say, Miss D. But that IS the level of conversation at DK. And that’s pretty much what is making them irrelevant. I mean who cares about THEM. There are people dying and that woman never seems to miss an opportunity to turn everything into ‘but what about me, me, me, pay attention to me’. It’s like the Jerry Springer Show. Not even good entertainment.

He, btd, got a pile of people banned including his friend and didn’t even have the decency, after admitting to his role in the carnage, to either get the bystanders and his friend re-installed or to quit himself. But that would take character.

The most interesting people there are in the diaries that do not get rec’d. If I bother with dk at all anymore, there are a few really intrigueing people worth reading who are quietly saying important things and that they are all but ignored on dk, is no surprise.

Ms xeno said:

Well, S.B., that’s more like cut-rate starfucking on the Kozzies’ part than it is genuine opportunism. I mean, they ask for nothing more, really. No big surprise that “nothing more” is what they get.

Yes, exactly, ms xeno – and they, the politicians, don’t have to change their ways at all, they just have to talk to ‘kossacks’ and act like they are ‘listening’. I really couldn’t understand that. I don’t know why they are so impressed with politicians talking to them. Politicians are supposed to talk to the people.

Wu Ming, I don’t understand why the military is worried about the content of 24 either. Sadly, as is becoming more and more obvious, torture is part of US policy and no one in Congress seems willing to take any meaningful action to change that. Nor is there much outrage from the American people.

A wee favour for those so inclined. I’ve posted an action alert on my blog to help a Canadian boy and his Iranian family who are stuck in a prison-like detention facility in Texas. I’m calling on people to contact their gov’t reps. Thanks!

Whoops. I just posted a comment here under the name “verbena19” Mcat. I had posted our action alert over at her WP blog and forgot to log out. She was out stuck in the snow at the time and asked me to blog it for her.

Anyway, I hope anyone interested in helping out this Canadian boy and his Iranian family who are in detention in Texas will help out by contacting your gov’t reps. Thanks!

mcat, did you get my email a few days ago? I’ve had problems with it lately which is why I ask. Also, I meant to say that Kevin Lynch was correct when he said he posted at DK. But the thread ended and I forgot to post a link. You have to click the archive box as comments go into archives pretty fast. Here’s a link to his comments, as he said:

So.

One of the participants in the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville was a man named Peter Tefft. He was outed by the Twitter group "Yes, You're Racist," which had been posting screenshots of participants in an effort to expose them. His father, Pearce Tefft, has come out and publicly denounced his white supremacist son in an open letter […]

Heather Heyer is the latest casualty in a number of deaths at the hands of white nationalists. Foreign Policy recently published an FBI and Department of Homeland Security bulletin that concluded white supremacist groups were "responsible for 49 homicides in 26 attacks from 2000 to 2016...more than any other domestic extremist movement." Despite th […]

As President Trump faces growing outrage over his response to the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, we bring you an exclusive: an interview with the great-great-grandsons of Confederate General Stonewall Jackson. At least 1,500 symbols of the Confederacy can be found in public spaces across the country. But now a number of the monu […]

In a wide ranging discussion, Nina Turner and Paul Jay focus on the role of Trump, the GOP, corporate Democrats and corporate media in perpetuating systemic racism; they also address whether Nazi's should have a right to organize public rallies

Ecuador's former president Rafael Correa is accusing recently elected president Lenin Moreno of moving the country to the right, using corruption accusations against Vice-President and Correa friend Jorge Glas as cover. TRNN's Greg Wilpert reports

BRIDGEWATER, N.J./WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump on Thursday decried the removal of monuments to the pro-slavery Civil War Confederacy, echoing white nationalists and drawing stinging rebukes from fellow Republicans in a controversy that has inflamed racial tensions.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump has stepped up his attacks on Republican senators, an approach he may regret if he is someday impeached and the Senate has to weigh charges against him stemming from an investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump has abandoned plans to create an infrastructure advisory council, the White House said on Thursday, the day after two other advisory groups were dismantled over the furor caused by Trump's remarks on white supremacists.

(Reuters) - Wisconsin's Republican-controlled state Assembly voted 59-30 on Thursday to approve a bill that paves the way for a $3 billion incentives package for a proposed liquid-crystal display plant by Taiwan's Foxconn.

Media

from Howl

I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma
by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the
roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the
hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse
O skinny legions run outside O starry
spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is
here O victory forget your underwear we're free
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-
journey on the highway across America in tears
to the door of my cottage in the Western night

October 7 1955

"a remarkable collection of angelson one stage reading their poetry"
"I think Allen Ginsberg standing up there reading - putting himself on the line - was one of the two bravest things I've ever seen. Remember, it was '55. People had crew cuts, and they looked at you like you were misplaced cannon fodder. The country was being run by Luce publications. It was a dangerous, cold, ugly time, and it was scary. . .
In all our memories no one had been so outspoken in poetry before. We had gone beyond a point of no return. None of us wanted to go back to the grey, chill, militaristic silence, to the intellectual void - to the land without poetry - to the spiritual drabness. We wanted to make it new and we wanted to invent it and the process of it as we went into it. We wanted voice and we wanted vision."
-Michael McClure

Democrats…

Same as goddam fucking forever.
Over and over, in election year after election year, GE and MidTerms both… the Dems start to purr and preen, they stretch luxuriously - at just being TOLD they are going to win [...]
It never fails.
... in February of 2002, looking over the already joyless congressional stragglers willing to be drafted for duty… they barely dreamed, yet, it was even possible (Howard, a different person then, had not arrived to say it could be done)… but one thing was clear, we could not rely on the party to swing it. Could not. You could smell it, they would screw the deal. And I am not talking about Howard and primary issues here. By the end, that was a passing political story. Chuck it on the heap.
[...]
Upshot? The Republicans make it thru. They hold on.